PCN - Senior Clinical Pharmacist

Key Duties and Responsibilities

• 1. Patient facing medicines support – Hold clinics for patients requiring medication reviews, stratifying the need for technical reviews, medicines adherence reviews (including polypharmacy reviews), focal long‑term condition/clinical reviews (see section 3) or holistic long‑term condition/clinical reviews (structured medication reviews). Provide support for patients with questions, queries, and concerns about their medicines.
• 2. Medicines related clinical support for care homes – Deliver clinical medication reviews in collaboration with patients, care home staff, and the Ageing Well team, producing clear and evidence‑based recommendations for the multidisciplinary team to support medicines optimisation, prescribing, and monitoring. Work collaboratively with care home staff and the Ageing Well team to optimise medicines management and promote safe, effective, and appropriate use of medicines, including updating medication at transfer of care and investigating and responding to requests for medication not on, or as on, repeat. Work with the Ageing Well Team and pharmacy team leadership to optimise communication, joined‑up working and skill‑mix at the interface between practices and the Ageing Well Team.
• 3. Long‑term condition Clinics – See (where appropriate) patients with single or multiple medical problems where medicine optimisation is required (e.g., Respiratory, Cardiovascular‑Reno‑Metabolic). Review the on‑going need for each medicine, a review of monitoring needs and an opportunity to support patients with their medicines taking ensuring they get the best use of their medicines (i.e. medicines optimisation). Make appropriate recommendations to GPs for medicine improvement.
• 4. Patient facing Domiciliary Structured Medication Reviews – Deliver clinical medication reviews with patients in care home or domiciliary settings and produce recommendations for multidisciplinary teams on (de)prescribing and monitoring.
• 5. Risk stratification – Identify cohorts of patients at increased risk of harm from medicines using agreed, preprepared practice clinical system searches. This may include risks that are patient‑related, medicine‑related, or a combination of both, and will include the use of prescribing and clinical decision‑support software such as Eclipse Live Radar 500 searches. Where appropriate, pharmacy technicians will be accountable for reviewing and acting on the outcomes of these searches within their scope of competence, in accordance with agreed protocols. Senior Clinical pharmacists will provide supervision and support where the management of high‑risk patients falls outside the pharmacy technicians competence, and will assume responsibility during periods of leave or in exceptional circumstances. Senior Clinical Pharmacists will delegate this supervision to clinical pharmacists, where appropriate, and support and mentor clinical pharmacists to have the competence for this to be delegated to them.
• 6. Unplanned hospital admissions – Review the use of medicines most commonly associated with unplanned hospital admissions and readmissions through audit and individual patient reviews. Put in place changes to reduce the prescribing of these medicines to high‑risk patient groups.
• 7. Management of medicines at discharge from hospital – Reconcile medicines following discharge from acute hospitals and intermediate care settings, including identifying, resolving, and appropriately escalating unexplained changes to medicines. Work collaboratively with patients, carers, community pharmacists, and wider healthcare professionals to ensure timely access to medicines and continuity of care postdischarge, including those requiring medicines compliance aids and residents of care homes. Provide mentorship, supervision, and appropriate delegation of medicines reconciliation activities to pharmacy technicians, clinical pharmacists and foundation pharmacists, in line with their competence and agreed governance arrangements.
• 8. Medicine information to practice staff and patients – Answer relevant medicine‑related enquiries from GPs, other network staff, other healthcare teams (e.g., community pharmacy) and patients with queries about medicines. Suggesting and recommending solutions. Providing follow‑up for patients to monitor the effect of any changes. Provide mentorship, supervision, and appropriate delegation of responding to queries to pharmacy technicians, clinical pharmacists and foundation pharmacists, in line with their competence and agreed governance arrangements.
• 9. Signposting – Ensure that patients are referred to the appropriate healthcare professional for the appropriate level of care within an appropriate time period (e.g., pathology results, common/minor ailments, acute conditions, long‑term condition reviews etc.).
• 10. Repeat prescribing – Manage the repeat prescribing re‑authorisation process by reviewing patient requests for repeat prescriptions and reviewing medicines reaching review dates and flagging up those needing a review. Ensure patients have appropriate monitoring tests in place when required.
• 11. Service development – Contribute pharmaceutical advice for the development and implementation of new services that have medicinal components (e.g., advice on treatment pathways and patient information leaflets). Bring insight and innovation to develop concepts for service development to support sustainable productivity and empower pharmacy professionals to strive towards meeting the needs of the PCN and its patients.
• 12. Information management – Analyse, interpret and present medicines data to highlight issues and risks to support decision making.
• 13. Medicines quality improvement – Undertake clinical audits of prescribing in areas directed by the GPs and the PCN team, feedback the results and implement changes in conjunction with the relevant practice team.
• 14. Medicines safety – Implement changes to medicines that result from MHRA alerts, product withdrawal and other local and national guidance.
• 15. Implementation of local and national guidelines and formulary recommendations – Monitor practice prescribing against the local health economies RAG list and make recommendations to GPs for medicines that should be prescribed by hospital doctors (red drugs) or subject to shared care (amber drugs).
• 16. Education, Mentoring and Clinical Supervision – Provide education and training to primary healthcare team on therapeutics and medicines optimisation.
• 17. Care Quality Commission – Work with the general practice teams to ensure the practices are compliant with CQC standards where medicines are involved.
• 18. Public health – Support public health campaigns and provide specialist knowledge on all public health programs available to the general public.

#J-18808-Ljbffr